8M returns and we will remember again that women aspire to everything, just like men, also to freedom from fear; this freedom to walk down the street without having to be aware of where you carry your phone in case you need to call or where you have your keys, in case you need to get home quickly. Tomorrow, 8M, they will let us make our demands. We have won the day, I don't know if much more.
They will give way to us tomorrow, and, from the sidelines, there will be those who feel rejection towards these women who seem like amazons, who irrationally rebel against male supremacy, as Montserrat Roig wrote. There is something Pythagorean, still, ancestral, fixed in the gaze of some. "There is a good principle, which has created order, light and man, and there is a bad principle, which has created chaos, darkness and woman." Pythagoras wrote this; it is something they don't teach you about him when you study him and he is elevated as the great Lord of Theorems, legs and the hypotenuse. A lost opportunity to explain that thing about separating the art from the artist. You discover this if you read Simone de Beauvoir, but since Beauvoir is not studied in schools, because it seems that it is not necessary and that throughout history there have only been men as philosophers and literati, Pythagoras's narrow-mindedness is not unmasked.
There are women who advance and open doors. In Catalonia, for example, and especially in Barcelona, a timid phenomenon is observed, or perhaps it is just a happy coincidence, of women leading cultural institutions. Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of MACBA; Judit Carrera, at the CCCB; Àngels Margarit, directing the Mercat de les Flors; at Fabra i Coats, Joana Hurtado... Carme Portaceli, directing the TNC; Judith Colell, at the Acadèmia del Cinema Català; Íngrid Guardiola, directing the Bòlit-Centre d'Art Contemporani de Girona; Anna Giribet, as artistic director of the Fira de Tàrrega... and we would find more.
Women who make us think that perhaps the day will come when we stop putting little crosses wherever there is a woman leading just for being a woman. And we will begin to take into account that each of them is more than a woman. A manager, a creative, a writer, a journalist, a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, an engineer, a biologist, a head full of ideas that commands. It is not power for power's sake, women have never had power, it is to feminize power, it is to make power see women and not silence them. It is power that is sensitive to the fact that the wage gap is still 20% and moves heaven and earth to shorten it, to give just one example.
8M runs the risk of becoming folklorized, of becoming the day when they let us do so that we have all the prominence. Tomorrow the proclamations will sound everywhere, while the rest of the days of the year we take silent steps to gain ground until the day comes when we are recognized, as women, as something more than a woman.